So far, 2020 hasn’t gone exactly how the writer, artist, and playwright Nick Flynn had planned it. Over the span of 12 months, he is releasing three new books, starting with September’s I Will Destroy You and last month’s Stay, a hybrid novel brimming with other artist’s contributions of words, design, and collage. The release for Stay was to be joined by public performances and events organized by Flynn and his friends in the literary and artistic fields that have helped him build a career over the last few decades.

In Stay he writes about the friends who inspired him in the years leading up to his 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, adapted for the screen as Being Flynn, which starred Juliannne Moore, Robert DeNiro, and Paul Dano. Over 13 books, he has delved into topics like trauma, adultery, homelessness, love, loss, and addiction, with a characteristic self-reflection.

Due to the coronavirus crisis, the events for Stay are now largely canceled, postponed, or going virtual. “In the midst of all that’s happening in the world,” he said in an email, “I would like to say that this is the book you need to get you through this difficult time, but I doubt that is true. It chronicles (in part), my [30] years of collaborations with other artists and friends—maybe working together and being inspired by others is what is needed at this moment?”

In person, Flynn is honest and easygoing, his humor tinged with self-deprecation. His spirit of adjustment and accommodation is reflected in Stay. “You wake up every morning in your same skin, and then do those things you have to do to find your best self,” he writes. “Some days it works better than others.”

The third book he’ll release this year is another memoir, This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, due out in August. Woven with the heartache of his poetry, it ponders redemption amid dysfunction, and asks readers to empathize and reflect on their own limitations. “It would be terrifying to drop an anchor in that dark sea,” he writes of his psyche in the book. Somehow, he can anchor himself through prose.

At a New York coffeehouse suggested by his wife, actor Lili Taylor, Flynn spoke with Vanity Fair about his youth, his collaborations with friends, and what it means to grapple with your own psychology on the page.

Vanity Fair: Over the course of a year, you will have released three books. Your poetry collection I Will Destroy You was out last year and then the memoir This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire comes out in August. Stay feels like the glue that brings them all together.

Nick Flynn: I hadn’t thought of it as glue, but I like that. It’s one of those things that once [a book] is sort of a done deal it’s inevitable in some way. You have to attach some metaphorical significance to it. Stay coming in the middle and holding these things together—glue is a good mortar—I hadn’t really thought of it that way. The interesting thing is that it has some passages from This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire which isn’t out yet so we had to get pre-rights to put it in there.

How did that go?

I stayed out of it. I just let [the publishers] fight it out [laughs]. I connected everyone and said, “I really support this and hope this happens.” I guess it worked. The thing is, I had proposed to Greywolf, W. W. Norton and to Wave Books and anyone who would listen for the last 10 years to do a book like Stay. I do all of these collaborations and I wanted to have a book that had that energy in it and brought it all together and they all said, “Yeah, no.” Then when I actually did it with ZE Books, the [other publishers] said, “Why aren’t we doing this?” and I said, “Because you didn’t want to do it.” I also don’t know if they could have—it was really labor intensive to put Stay together. I sat with the designer for an entire spring. It’s very design heavy. It’s a little art object. It’s more than most presses would do. They would need to have someone else come in and that’s not part of their budget.

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Transcending mediums in our work in that way, it helps readers access books they might not have traditionally picked up. Someone who might not pick up a poetry book might pick up Stay. Or someone who might not pick up a memoir but is interested in art or collage and poetry could pick it up.

The separation of the arts is a strange phenomenon, really. I don’t understand the benefit of it. There’s a lot of writing programs that if you’re admitted in poetry you cannot take a workshop in fiction. That is really insane. And you would definitely not go to the art department.

Collaboration always made sense to me. When I was a kid, when I was about my daughter’s age—she’s 12 now—I spent an entire summer with a friend of mine and I’m pretty much 100% sure I convinced him the best way we could spend our time would be to collaboratively write a mystery like Sherlock Holmes. We were pretty nerdy. I mean me and him, we literally wrote like 50 pages of this thing. We set it in Scotland and Egypt because those are the most remote places we could think of…it was really exciting. I’d say, “What do we do today? Let’s work on a book,” and we did it.

In Stay, you mention that anyone who came to your dorm room in college had to contribute by typing something.

If you came into my dorm, there was always a typewriter set up. You had to type something in the typewriter to continue the story. I thought it was interesting to have other voices and not just have it be coming from me. Lyric stuff is really beautiful and essential and great, but it’s only one level. The world is bigger.

Even if you keep it solitary, what you can learn from an artist, from working with the artist, you could bring it back to your own practice. I’ve been doing these little paintings now, these drawings I did with walnut ink, which I learned from my friend, Mark Adams, who’s in Stay. It’s so beautiful. He and I teach a workshop together now every summer where I feel I’m cheating because I’m really just teaching the workshop to learn from him.

All of your current projects grapple with hard topics like adultery, homelessness, and suicide. How do you feel about all of this?

I always tell my students—especially if you’re writing things that are somehow painful or revealing or wrestling with trauma, which pretty much all poets do—we’re all a little fucked up. Otherwise, why would they be poets?

I do think that one project of being human is to try to understand why we do the things we do. I don’t think that’s a solipsistic activity either. I took a meditation workshop years ago, which really set me on a path with Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and monk. He had us do a mass meditation at a certain time. There were certain moments where there were world meditations happening where everyone who’s part of a spiritual community would meditate at a certain moment about something good. It seems really goofy and new agey. But if you can just imagine, if literally everyone in the world did that, something good would happen. I think that with writing or trying to understand oneself…you can still do things that are damaging and hurtful, and not great. Then somehow, you [wake up and realize], “Oh yeah, this is a thing I do.”

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Most of us struggle with that—taking a moment to be in the dysfunction and name it, or seeing where it comes up and not engaging with it.

Writing This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, I could only go into it for a short amount of time and then I’d have to put it away. Having spent the last 30 years always living in a book, I needed to see what it was like to simply be in this world. The book wasn’t always in my head. In the past, writing had been a type of obsession: distancing oneself from the world, [a] type of protection. There’s all sorts of reasons one would do that [and it wouldn’t be on the] spectrum of the healthiest things. But you get rewarded for it, you get books. You get a certain type of understanding. But [in] your day-to-day life, maybe you’re not the best partner in those times. So I was trying to not do that [with This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire]. Then when I stopped writing, when I started to see, then a lot of the books came out of that, because suddenly, this other stuff rushed in. The stuff that you get to keep at bay from not writing suddenly comes in. It’s like a narrative-affect disorder. When I stopped writing, that fullness rose up and it was really quite devastating. The things I’d been doing to avoid feeling that came up—it all had to be dealt with. I would go and write, so the books got written, but I would do these really concentrated periods. I’d just immerse myself and it was really hard to do, and really psychically risky in some way.

It seems the job of the artist, or any human maybe, is to push as deeply as possible into the inner life. To understand why we do what we do. I believe much of the world’s troubles are created by people who are in no way self-reflective. When I teach, I warn my students that writing in this way, mining these depths, is dangerous work. Creating art can, at times, be cathartic, but it can just as easily derail you. It’s the thing one has to do to get in the psychic and spiritual shape to write the work that brings any possibility of catharsis. There’s no guarantee of catharsis [in] writing. Aristotle never said anything about that. He never said anything about the makers of the poem. He talked about going to see art. That’s where you get catharsis. That’s why I go and talk to other artists too. I find that very moving and…